Twin of the Amazon
Page 16
As he hit the wall the fist descended for the final blow, a battering downward concussion on the back of his neck. He sagged weakly, and dropped.
The Amazon stooped, found him unconscious and still breathing. She snapped in the Ultra’s automatic pilot and then hauled the senseless Martian over her shoulder and bore him along the passage to one of the storage rooms. His dead companion she also carried there, slamming and locking the door on them.
Returning to the control chair, and taking care that she could not be seen through the window by the attendant fliers, she began to change the Ultra’s course, swinging it round in a wide arc and noting that in obedience to orders the flying saucers were doing likewise. Having been told to implicitly obey orders, she was sanguine that such would be the case, no matter how strange a route she seemed to take.
And strange it was, in so far that as time went on she deviated many millions of miles away from the approaching Earth, keeping well to the left of it—and, with the passage of the hours, set the course for Venus. How the time passed did not concern her. She went about her task inperturbably, though there were times when she did wonder what the officers aboard the flying saucers must be thinking of this deliberate by-passing of Earth and setting of the course for Venus. She relied on the fact that, having been told to obey orders—and believing them to be genuine, since Ilthan himself had spoken them—they would do so to the death. No doubt many of them were wondering why he had not destroyed Mars at the million-mile range—unless, as was probable, that scheme had been known only to himself and his now dead colleague.
Even Venus was not the Amazon’s objective, however, familiar though the gleaming planet was. She steered as far to one side of it as she had from Earth, and continued hurtling the Ultra onwards into the void, taking care that her distance from the nearest flying saucers was great enough to prevent any possible chance of her thoughts being read across the gulf.
Hour after hour she sat tirelessly at the controls, unable to trust the plan she had in mind to the automatic pilot. With ever-mounting velocity, pursued faithfully by the gilded flying saucers, she streaked in the direction of Mercury’s orbit, that far-flung erratic little world—a withered walnut of a planet, scorched on his sunward side so that metals boiled; so frozen on his night side that the very rocks were split under the unimaginable frost.
The Amazon’s attention was not concentrated on little Mercury away to the left in the void. Instead she dropped a layer of dark shields over the outlook ports and through them looked at the awe-inspiring majesty of the sun, lord of the solar system. With every second that passed the Ultra was speeding nearer to him, his brilliance becoming gradually so intense that the Amazon had to pile up more layers of darkening glass to ease her aching eyes.
Behind her, also with dark glass over their windows, the flying saucers were still trailing, but the radio was buzzing frantically at the girl’s elbow, presumably from the officers wishing to know the reason for this dangerous expedition within the range of the mighty solar gravitational field. The Amazon ignored the radio, knowing that her voice would give her away: she relied on the one fact that, to the very death, the Martians would follow “Ilthan’s” lead.
They did—and through hours which seemed endless the Amazon still drove on, keeping a wary eye on the instruments which registered the power of solar drag. Here, increasingly near the lord of light, space itself was slightly buckled out of true by the vast gravitational strains. The Ultra was inside the orbit of Mercury and still hurtling onwards, the shields over the ports now so dense that they were four inches thick, yet even at this the intolerable sea of flame raging ahead made the Amazon fear that her sight would be permanently impaired. Yet, on the other hand, she dared not take her gaze away from that cauldron of fluid energies: upon it depended the success of her plan.
Solar prominences reached out unfathomably into space: the corona filled all the void behind that mighty searing circle sweeping ever nearer— Then, as the instruments showed that the dead-line had been reached, the Amazon swung the Ultra violently sideways and with a terrific burst of power swept diagonally to her former course, the sun to one side of her instead of straight ahead.
According to the gauges, she had just crossed the divisional margin of safety between outer space and the gravitational field of the sun. Of necessity she gave the atomic power-plant every vestige of energy in a desperate bid to tear free of the sun’s inexorable grip and fight back into the region where his influence would progressively weaken.
Then, with a numbed feeling of horror, she began to wonder if she had left things until too late. She was not making any headway. Even though the Ultra was moving diagonally to the sea of flame, it was also drifting slowly towards it.
With grim eyes the Amazon stared through the shields, satisfied at least that her plan, in essence, had worked. In a chain, unable to save themselves, the entire armada of flying saucers had followed her across the line and was streaming down towards that inconceivable furnace of boiling energies, utterly lost, unable to tear free, bearing with them the remains of the Martian race. Her plan, to hurl the last of the Martians into the sun, had proven a success. Even as she watched, the flying saucers became remote against the screen-darkened cauldron, and finally they vanished.
Quickly the Amazon switched in the auxiliary motors which had the effect of doubling the power impetus. The Ultra jerked and strained, but it still did not check its sunward drift. Jumping out of the control-chair, the girl went over to the power-plant and stared at it. The block of copper from which the energy was derived was shrinking at an alarming speed. Once it had entirely dissipated there was nothing to stop the Ultra following the doomed flying saucers to destruction.
Turning, she raced out of the control-room to one of the storage chambers and brought forth two more copper blocks. Of necessity she had to switch off the current whilst she fixed the blocks into place, and in that time she lost half a million miles of distance.
The heat in the control-room increased to intolerable proportions, even through the heavily insulated shell. Motionless, the Amazon sat at the control-board, peering through slitted eyes at the terrifying vision outside. Playing tag with solar gravity was one trick she had never attempted before, and she was wondering if, in destroying the Martian race, she had tempted fate too far.
The power-plant hummed and whined incessantly as she gave it the maximum load. The needles remained motionless on the dials. The vessel was still travelling diagonally to the sun, but neither pulling away from nor going towards it. There was also the danger that beneath the furious heat blasting through space the rocket-tubes themselves would fuse, and so stop the power-plant operating.
Half-blinded, the Amazon still manoeuvred the switches, giving a little power here, removing it there, edging the vessel mile by mile—twisting, wriggling, diving. The windows were no longer blazing shields. They seemed to be dancing with darkness, and the girl knew with growing horror that, masked though the solar glare was, the radiations were seeping through and damaging her sight.
Weakly she got up and stumbled to a cupboard, taking from it a pair of dense goggles which she slipped over her face. They blinded her completely, but she prayed that they would at least stop the radiations driving at her.
By touch alone she continued operating the switches, her body sensitive to every surge and movement of the machine; then at last to her intense relief she heard the sudden intake of power by the plant, which announced it was ceasing its laborious struggle against a superior gravity.
It was a note which grew. Breathing hard, drenched in perspiration, the girl played her fingers up and down the control switches until at last the note in the power-plant became steady. She wrenched the goggles from her eyes and looked at the gauges. They were clouded with darkness, and her eyes throbbed unmercifully.
The needles were swinging free. The Ultra was slowly pulling away from that titanic maw in space, gaining speed with every second. With her eyes shut the Amaz
on drove onwards, until finally the Ultra had crossed the demarcation line and was back in free space.
Slowly relaxing, the girl snapped the automatic pilot in position and staggered away from the control-chair to lie down on the wall-bed. For nearly an hour she lay flat, a hand over her eyes; then she reached out and snapped the switch which raised the screens from the ports.
At first, even the brilliant sunshine seemed faded and weak and the shadows impenetrably dark; then with the passage of time the darkness began to lift and the intolerable pressure behind her eyes faded. The radiations, which had been more than sufficient to forever destroy the sight of a normal person, had with her super-normal physique only numbed the optic nerves. Now the numbness was dissipating, and with it came a clear return of sight and gathering bodily strength.
Slowly she got up and gave a glance outside. She was far enough away from the sun now to be sure of safety. Infinitely distant, shining with the brilliance of a diamond, was Venus; and in the nearer foreground, erratic little Mercury. Turning to the short-wave radio, she switched it on, contacting Earth by direct transmission. It was a long time with the static warp from the sun, before any clear answer came through from Earth; then there was another delay whilst Chris Wilson was connected. His voice, speaking over nearly ninety million miles of space, sounded reedy and abysmal.
“Then you’re still safe, Vi? That’s fine hearing....”
“Yes, I’m safe,” she agreed, her voice heavy. “I very nearly wasn’t, though. I’m only three millions miles from the sun, and into it have gone all the Martians we needed to worry about.”
“What! You flung them in the sun?”
“They flung themselves—but I admit I led them into it. That chapter is finished, Chris. We can take over empty Mars any time we want—and we will. I want you to start those ultrasonic projectors going and destroy the metal-eaters. The job shouldn’t take more than a week. When I get back to Earth I’ll root out what few Martians there are in Earth bodies and destroy them.... On my way back I’ll be stopping at Venus to stay for a while with Ruth and inform her that Howard is alive and well.”
“See you later then,” Chris said. “And I’ll go to work with the projectors right away. I have all the locations mapped out.”
“Good!”
The Amazon switched off and sat back thankfully, smiling a little to herself.
“Which should surely leave the inner circle of planets free from now on,” she mused. “Certainly the Martian chapter is closed—or almost...”
Getting to her feet, she went up the corridor and unlocked the storage room where she had put the unconscious Ilthan nd his dead companion. She dragged them both as far as ne control-room and laid them on the floor, moving a switchboard control.
A section of the floor gave way into a trap below, dropping the bodies into it. The floor re-sealed itself and a second trap into the void opened. The Amazon looked out of the window and presently detected two shapeless masses of grey dust following the Ultra, bodies blasted to cosmic powder by the inconceivable zero of outer space, and chained to the space-ship by its slight gravity-field.
She watched the remains for a long moment—then, glancing in the direction of brilliant Venus, she began to chart her course.
THE END
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